


Peter Pan's brother

by RedAnthem



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Ben Hargreeves-centric, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Peter Pan References, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-28
Updated: 2021-01-28
Packaged: 2021-03-14 13:01:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29046549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedAnthem/pseuds/RedAnthem
Summary: Their siblings say Ben's floor of the house is haunted.
Relationships: Ben Hargreeves & Vanya Hargreeves, Number Five | The Boy & Ben Hargreeves, Number Five | The Boy & Ben Hargreeves & Vanya Hargreeves, Number Five | The Boy & Vanya Hargreeves
Comments: 11
Kudos: 33





	Peter Pan's brother

**Author's Note:**

> Ben & Five is so underappreciated. Season 3 better show us more of what Ben's relationship to his siblings was like, especially his relationship with Five.  
> Anyway everyone's convinced that 567 was the crew but honestly? Nobody in that house got along 100%, and the differences between Five & Ben (especially in terms of their attitudes toward power) are way more interesting to me, so here's a more grey take on them.

Vanya’s out there in the hallway again.

Ben knows this because the lights are on, and he didn’t hear who came up the stairs and turned them on, which means that it has to be Vanya, because only Vanya treads so lightly around the house.

He bets that if he got up out of bed, opened the door, and walked down the hallway, he would see her making those sandwiches and fingering her silver locket like a rosary. She’d be gazing out the window to see down the darkened street, sitting there for a long time, before making her quiet way downstairs again to her small and cramped room. Just as she does every night.

He has to admire her stubbornness. Everyone else decided to forget about him, but not her. When dad put up that portrait of him looking serenely out at the world, as if he’d just gone for a stroll, each of Ben’s siblings—except for little Vanya—took that to mean that Five must’ve really done it this time. No, nobody believed he really time travelled. No, he must be dead, must’ve blasted himself into smithereens, scattered himself into pieces with the force of his own power, because why else would _dad_ not know where he was? Dad knew everything, even when the world was going to die. 

Vanya was still holding out hope though, or perhaps this was her form of grieving. She was the only one left grieving, too. None of them really liked Five as much as she did, to be honest. Their dear brother was an insane egomaniac to the end, and only grew greater in this aspect as they grew up. So it was probably for the best that he was taken up by the Girl Upstairs so soon, because if he was allowed to grow any older they’d all be in trouble. 

His brother would stay young forever, a lost boy living in the realm of imagination, like Peter Pan. 

Still, while the rest of the house was sleeping (or pretending to be, anyway), little Vanya was still making her sandwiches and crying silently to sleep on the floor, holding out hope that Five would come back some day.

It was a little pathetic, and it made him sad.

The strange truth: for some unexplainable, alien reason, Five loved Vanya. One of the few signs, Ben thought, that Five ever had any softness left in his heart. When it was time for family portraits and Vanya would pout and yell from the sidelines as the rest of them gazed unyieldingly forward, Five—always by his side—would squirm fitfully and impatiently like ignoring her physically hurt him. When the rest of them came back exhausted and hurt after missions or practices, Five would pretend nothing was wrong and smile and tell her how it all went. At mealtimes, the pair would substitute real speech for meaningful glances and notes passed under the table. When they could talk, it was in a way only they understood; shorthands and phrases and meanings that always had footnotes that only the other could read. Their own little world at the edge of everyone else’s. None of the others seemed to notice, they didn't make it obvious, but Ben always did.

One time when they were 11, Ben told Five he wanted to kill himself. It was the night after training, after dad made him kill a man for the first time. It wasn’t on purpose. His name was Rob, and he was a technician, one of the many hired to fight off the Horror inside Ben’s stomach so one day Ben would get strong enough to save the world. 

After it happened, dad didn’t react at all; just nodded his head and went to draft a letter of condolences for the guy’s family or something. The training room was closed for the rest of the day so the custodial staff could mop up the blood and chunks of flesh. Pogo looked at him with those old, pitying eyes and Mom baked them all cookies to cheer him up afterwards.

Ben didn’t know how to feel at first. He just felt hollow inside. He just scrubbed all his feelings and thoughts out like the blood caked in his hair and skin. Then the lights turned out for bedtime and he was left staring at the ceiling, by himself, and he got to thinking. Which is when he came to the conclusion that maybe he wasn’t just the host to the Horror; he _was_ the Horror. He let dad let him kill that guy. And he was going to let dad let him kill a whole bunch of guys again, and he was going to do that for the rest of his miserable life, probably.

That’s when he fell out of bed, like he was in a spaceship hurtling toward Earth, burning up as he went. He wanted to kill himself. He was going to do it, going to _have_ to do it to keep himself from murdering people, to protect whatever sanctity his soul had left. He was crying so hard, and every time he thought about the future and happiness he didn’t have the right to have, he wanted to kill himself all over again. 

Five must’ve heard something because that’s when he showed up, and Ben hates him for it, still. It was kind’ve embarrassing to think about, that he was being so loud that Five could hear him from down the hallway. But Five was there, and he saw him crying alone in the dark of his room. And he walked up to the side of the bed where he was on the floor, and he kicked him with his toe, and Ben told him _I think I want to kill myself,_ and Five said _No you aren’t idiot, because I won’t let you,_ in that simple and resolute way of his.

(The Horror told him, in their abyssal and slithering tongue, **_he’s lying._ **And somehow he knows, in the strange and subcranial way that he inexplicably knows things, but it’s the thought that counts.)

To be honest, he hates his brother still. You’re not supposed to speak or think ill of the dead, but Five was never confirmed by their dad to be dead, so, who knows. 

He hates him because he knows Five wouldn’t be up crying all night because he killed a person. He knows because he’s seen him do it before, plenty of times. He’d taunt them too, a cat playing with its prey, because it was fun, because they were gods and the real world was just their playground. 

He hates him because he got all the ups of interdimensiality without any of the downsides. Five got to jump around space and not exist while Ben was left throwing up on the ground with vertigo. His power was stuck inside him, something that defied reason, something bigger on the inside than the outside, begging to be let out, to swallow the world and everything Ben loved in it. While Five got to fly and weave through the fabric of reality, betwixt and between a bird and a boy. 

He hates him because he’s everything dad ever wanted in a son and it _still_ wasn’t enough for him. The only one dad would ever say _slow down, you might get hurt_ to. _If you run before you walk you’ll trip and fall and scrape your knee._

He hates him most for this:

Five could’ve left any time he wanted but he chose breakfast when nobody could say anything to him, couldn’t even say goodbye, when nobody knew that it would be the last time. Not even Vanya. Five could do anything, could’ve taken him along even, but he chose to run away by himself instead. Did he even know how much Ben wanted to be him? Wanted his power? Wanted to leave the house and their family behind, wanted to be a real boy, wanted to go to school and then university, wanted to become a writer, wanted to fall in love and feel and do all the parts of living that he could outside of this house? 

But Ben will have to wait and grow up, and Five will be a lost boy encased in the amber of their memories forever.

Ben gets up.

He opens his bedroom door. He looks down the lit, arsenic green hallway. His siblings say this floor is haunted. Mom makes her rounds and turns the lights off every night but this light is always on in the morning. They joke that it’s Five communicating from beyond the grave (and Klaus will never tell), and it makes Vanya cry, but nobody notices. Except for him.

She’s asleep beside her nightly offering. To what god, he doesn’t know. He can see the salt tracks in the corner of her eyes.

He kicks her lightly with his toe, and she shakes awake. 

“Ben?”

She’s surprised to see him there. They don’t talk much, Six and Seven, but Ben thinks it doesn’t have to be that way forever.

“You have to keep the window open for him to come in, you know.”

“What?”

He sidesteps, and sits down beside her against the wall. “Do you do this every night?” He asks, though he knows the answer.

“Yeah… It’s stupid, I know,” she murmurs. “But what if he really is just lost out there? What if he comes back home, and he doesn’t know we’re still here waiting for him, and he leaves again?” 

Her eyes are watery and brown with long lashes, like a baby cow’s, shielded by her mousy brown bangs. His little sister. 

“What do you think he’s doing right now?” she asks him. 

She’s hopelessly lost, he knows. He knows because he knows what it’s like to be hollowed out with an abyss living inside, and she looks exactly like that: hollow. She has become melancholic, has incorporated the loss inside herself; a void-creature. Before Five left, Vanya would still edge her way into the group somehow, either by Five’s insistence or her own will, but now she hangs to the side not even making an effort anymore, listless and blank. She doesn’t even speak to the rest of them anymore unless she has to. It’s been more than a year, and she’s still staying up all nights, performing her rituals of mourning. They say that when you lose someone, you lose a language too; the dialect of shared memory. 

He won’t tell her the truth that they all know.

“Sword fighting with pirates,” he answers glibly. 

She nudges his elbow. “I’m serious,” she whispers, but she has a small smile on her face. Then: “I hope he comes back someday.” Ben doesn’t, and he doesn’t know why.

She goes to bed. 

* * *

The next day Ben starts writing again. And that night, he starts telling her his stories. It becomes a ritual, whenever he has them, and whenever the others have their turn with dad’s electrodes. He’ll think it up in the day and then share it with her that night by the window. In his stories their brother is as he was in life: arrogant and a bit bratty, serious beyond his years and yet charmingly childish; a winged trickster who is capable of doing everything and anything except for settling down. _Five Hargreeves, or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up,_ he thinks. 

He thinks that when he grows up and leaves the house, he’ll turn it into a book someday that he’ll share with the whole world; a book about his family, and all their intricacies and secrets, cleverly encapsulated in a fantastic fictional tale with his own lost boys and his haunted houses and his Peter Pan.

**Author's Note:**

> The silver locket Vanya has is a reference to the pilot episode script, where there's a silver locket in her room... it'll probably never show up in the show but it's cool to think about.
> 
> If S3 grants me the wish of my heart I *may* add a second chapter. Or maybe just read J.M. Barrie's "Lock-out Time" in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens :)
> 
> Find me on tumblr @nerdkiller!


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